A Strange Story From North Of The Border

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In 2006, while serving as a United Nations observer, a Canadian soldier named Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener and three other UN soldiers were killed when Israeli forces struck the outpost along the Israeli-Lebanon border at which the four of them were stationed. At the time, there was a lot of informed speculation that Hezbollah fighters had been using the UN outpost as a kind of safe area. However, that speculation did not account for a report that the UN commander in the area had warned the Israeli military that, "You're killing my people" and that the fatal attack proceeded anyway. The Canadian government opened an investigation into the events and, in 2008, that investigation made public its report, which concluded that the deaths were preventable, and which faulted the Israeli military for the deaths of the four UN observers.

Now is where it gets strange.

According to a recent story in the Ottawa Citizen, the report has been disappeared from the Canadian Defence Department website.

In an email sent to the Citizen, DND confirmed it had removed the board of inquiry report from its website in early 2009 for security reasons "after it was discovered that some of its content is considered protected information."

There was a two-year investigation, and then the report was published, and it took them another year to realize that some of the content was protected information? That dog does not hunt very well.

The affair has been bubbling under Canadian politics for a while now. von Kruedener's widow has been actively agitating against the performance of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government as regards the death of her husband almost from the start, and this recent revelation has brought her outrage to a boil again.